Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World, Second Edition

From 'After Virtue' to a New Monasticism

Jonathan R. Wilson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781556358982
  9781498211734
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621893233
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The first edition of Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World became one of the founding and guiding texts for new monastic communities. In this revised edition, Jonathan Wilson focuses more directly on lessons for these communities from Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. In the midst of the unsettling cultural shifts from modernity to postmodernity, a new monastic movement is arising that strives to be a faithful witness to the gospel. These new monastic communities seek to participate in Christ's life in the world and bear witness by learning to live intentionally as the church in Western culture. This movement is about finding the church's center in Christ in the midst of a fragmented world, overcoming the failure of the Enlightenment project and our complicity with it, resisting the temptation to Nietzschean power, and building communities of disciples. This new edition is greatly enlarged from the original volume. It includes responses to critics of the new monasticism such as D. A. Carson, an entirely new chapter on the Nietzschean temptation, an afterword on properly understanding the new monastic movement, the dangers it faces, and the work yet to be done, as well as an appendix on the supposed post-modern agenda of Jonathan Wilson and Brian McLaren. For those striving to understand the path the church should take in this fragmented world, this book is essential reading.

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Living with Our History

One of the most important lessons that the church can learn from After Virtue is implicit in the structure and approach of the book. In that book, MacIntyre narrates the history of two ethical theories, one springing from the Enlightenment, the other from Aristotle. For MacIntyre, telling these stories constitutes an argument about morality. Note that the story is not just an illustration of an argument or an example to aid understanding. The story is the argument.

In later chapters, we will consider the force of MacIntyre’s argument for some form of the Aristotelian tradition. What concerns us here is not which tradition MacIntyre commends or whether he is right to commend it; rather, what concerns us is the form of MacIntyre’s argument. For him, the confrontation between these two traditions can only be adjudicated by attending to their histories. These traditions are not two disembodied arguments whose strengths and weaknesses can be captured in a list and then compared. The very identification of them as “traditions” means that they have a history. MacIntyre teaches us that attending to that history—telling the stories of these traditions—itself constitutes an argument that may or may not commend a particular tradition.

Like these traditions, the church also has a history. Often, we study this history and tell it for seemingly trivial reasons—just to “know more” or to “add to our knowledge.” So, we may memorize dates and names to impress our friends. Sometimes, we will study the history in order to understand Christian doctrine better. We may, for example, give considerable attention to the early church councils, where we worked out the central convictions of the church on the two natures of Jesus Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. At times, we may give a lot of attention to periods when the church’s history overlaps significantly with other historical concerns, such as the impact of revivalism on American culture. But, with a few notable exceptions, we have done very little to tell the history of the church as an argument for Christian faith.1

When I wrote the first edition of Living Faithfully, the church’s history was already a problem in Western culture—the Crusades, witchcraft trials, support for slavery, and more were perceived by the culture as arguments against the truth of Christianity and the “good news of Jesus Christ.” Since that first edition, the situation has gotten worse. The larger cultural mood may be well-captured by Dan Kimball’s They Like Jesus but Not the Church.2

Today, the history of the church is perceived by many as one of the strongest arguments against belief in the good news of Jesus Christ. Even among those who “like Jesus” the approach to him is to pick what you like from his teaching and way of life and leave behind everything you don’t like. A part of this practice includes choosing as your friends on this journey those with whom you are in general agreement. Even those who seek some new form of “church” often presume that it will exclude those who have been loyal to older forms of church.

In this context, new monastic communities are important in two ways. First, new monastic communities can offer a witness to the truth of the gospel by embracing the history of the church in confession and repentance. To engage in these practices, a community needs a life disciplined by the gospel and a deeply shared communal life. This does not mean that new monastic communities are closer to perfection that other “forms” of church. Indeed, the life of older and newer monastic communities is marked by conflict, sometimes very deep conflict. But what monastic communities have is a shared life, an intentionality, and a process that enables them to bear witness to the gospel in the ways that they engage in reconciliation with the history of the church, those alienated by its history, and their own community.

Second, new monastic communities embrace the history of the church in their “humble submission to Christ’s body, the church,” (Mark 5) and in their “hospitality to the stranger” (Mark 3). These marks of new monasticism commit its communities to the history of the church and to other forms of church that may be as likely to be strangers as anyone from outside the church.

Therefore, for these reasons, and others that we will encounter along the way, new monastic communities are crucial to the lesson that the church must learn to live with our history as an argument.

History-as-Argument

There are many reasons for our neglect of history-as-argument. Two are particularly important. First, we have tended to think of arguments on a model that was given to us by philosophy. On this model—there are others, but this one has predominated—arguments are constructed syllogistically; they are disembodied, ahistorical arguments for disembodied, ahistorical people. People have no history that influences their reason; positions likewise have no history that enters into an argument. One of MacIntyre’s primary aims is to expose the failure of this presupposition, what in ethical theory he calls “the failure of the Enlightenment project.” MacIntyre exposes this failure, not through a syllogistic argument, but by telling the history of the Enlightenment project so that we see its regrettable results. By narrating the failure of this project in moral terms, MacIntyre exposes the failure of the presupposition underlying ahistorical, disembodied arguments. From MacIntyre, the church should start learning how to tell its story as an argument for its witness to the Gospel.

The second reason that the church has neglected the notion of history-as-argument is a fear that our history would be an argument against rather than for the Gospel. Certainly there are grounds for this fear. The church has often sinned, and sinned greatly, against God and humanity in the name of the Gospel. But our fear is misplaced for several reasons. First, it mistakenly confuses the church and the Gospel. The Gospel is not just a message; it is the reality of God’s redeeming activity through Jesus Christ.3 The church is a human community called into existence by God and sustained by God as a witness to the Gospel, but the church is not the Gospel. The history of the church is the story of how far the church is from the Gospel, but it is also the history of how God uses the church to witness to God’s redemption of creation. When the church is unfaithful, God still makes the church a witness to the kingdom by God’s judgment: “Judgment begins with the household of God” (1 Peter 4:17). Moreover, the history of the church’s failures is the history of the church’s recognition of its distance from the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That is, even the failures of the church may witness to the Gospel when those failures are recognized and properly confessed. Of course, we must be careful not to turn this into an argument for more sin in the church, as Paul imagines his interlocutors doing in Romans 6. Nevertheless, the point remains: the church is not the Gospel, so we must become more adept at telling the story of the church and the Gospel so that we witness to the Gospel.

Second, our fear of our history disembodies our faith. At the same time that we avoid the church’s history we also avoid the history of the Gospel at work in this world. This double neglect disembodies the Gospel of Jesus Christ and renders it unreal in the world. One of the reasons that there is such a gap between most formal theology and the life of the church is that formal theology disembodies the Gospel. Real people and real lives have a history. We are not merely intellects processing logical arguments; we are human beings seeking a way of life. Week after week, preachers and other believers labor mightily to overcome this neglect and to embody the faith without significant help from theology. Now, there is certainly a place for formal theology. Indeed, this book is mostly an example of what I am criticizing. My plea is that we recognize the limitations of this approach and give more attention to history-as-argument.

If we do not attend to our history, in addition to confusing the Gospel and the church and disembodying the Gospel, we will become victims of our past. If we do not attend to our history, then the forces that have shaped us and brought us to this point will determine our fate. They become so familiar and comfortable that they become the very air that we breathe. As a consequence, we do not recognize the betrayals of the Gospel that have taken place, and we do not identify the distance between the Gospel and the church. In God’s love for this world, God has never allowed the church to be completely faithless. God’s judgment purifies and a remnant always remains as faithful witnesses. In these instances, the church’s fear of its history results in a failure to recognize and confess our sin, and leads us into God’s judgment so that we might be purified.

If we do not attend to our history, others also become victims of our past. The church has continually mistaken its judgment for God’s will. History is replete with peoples who have been victimized by the church’s mistaken judgments. As we continually deny these mistakes or suppress our memory of them, the church is bound to move on to other oppressive mistakes. We need continually to tell our story as confession of our unfaithfulness, so that the world may see beyond the church to the Gospel and so that we may all maintain a healthy suspicion of the church’s confident pronouncements of God’s will. In such a way, the church will be less likely to victimize others.

Often, the church denies its history in order to protect its existence. If we admit our past and its mistakes, that seems very much like an admission that the church has no necessary claim on existence. But that reasoning is contrary to the Gospel. In the Gospel, the church knows that we have been given everything necessary to life and salvation in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, God has claimed this world for redemption: the church witnesses to that redemption, it has no need to claim this world for itself. The church’s only reason for existence is as a witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the church is free to tell its story as confession, and in so doing free itself to witness to the kingdom.

In addition to denying our past, another mistake we can make is glorifying our past. In other words, rather than coping with the failures of the past by denying that we have a history, we may cope with the failures of the past by glorifying our successes and ignoring our failures.4 Instead of a blanket denial of the past, we indulge in a selective denial. This is a serious temptation in Western culture, most especially in the United States, where the church can claim considerable influence on our culture. Looking back, we can glorify the past and lament the loss of the good old days when Christians were the majority or society at least accepted Christian values. Having made this step, we may then conclude that the mission of the church is to reassert this dominance in society.

This approach is easily identifiable today in much of the political action pursued in the name of Christianity. The church in the U.S., more than in any other nation marked by Western culture, looks to the past as a glorious time of Christian rule to which we must return if we are to turn away God’s wrath. Two arguments stand against this approach. First, it represents the error of “Constantinianism.”5 Where denying our past may be a result of confusing the kingdom and the church, glorifying our past is often the result of confusing the kingdom and society. Since the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity and the subsequent rise of Christianity as the dominant religion of the empire in the early decades of the fourth century, the church has continually fallen into the error of thinking that the mission of the church was not to make disciples of Jesus Christ among all nations, but to rule the world by exercising power through political structures. According to this way of thinking, the mission of the church in the modern world is, first, to gain control of the political processes so that the laws of the land reflect Christian values and, second, to form church members into good citizens who will sustain the political life of the nation. In this way, our glorious Christia...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Living with Our History
• Chapter 2: Fragmented Worlds
• Chapter 3: Resisting the Nietzschean Temptation
• Chapter 4: Recovering Tradition
• Chapter 5: The New Monasticism
• Afterword
• Appendix: D. A. Carson on the Wilson/McLaren Post-Modern Agenda
• Bibliography